Market concentration | EPFL Graph Search

In economics, market concentration is a function of the number of firms and their respective shares of the total production (alternatively, total capacity or total reserves) in a market. Market concentration is the portion of a given market's market share that is held by a small number of businesses. To ascertain whether an industry is competitive or not, it is employed in antitrust law and economic regulation. When market concentration is high, it indicates that a few firms dominate the market and oligopoly or monopolistic competition is likely to exist. In most cases, high market concentration produces undesirable consequences such as reduced competition and higher prices. The market concentration ratio measures the concentration of the top firms in the market, this can be through various metrics such as sales, employment numbers, active users or other relevant indicators. In theory and in practice, market concentration is closely associated with market competitiveness, and therefore is important to various antitrust agencies when considering proposed mergers and other regulatory issues. Market concentration is important in determining firm market power in setting prices and quantities. Market concentration is affected through various forces, including barriers to entry and existing competition. Market concentration ratios also allows users to more accurately determine the type of market structure they are observing, from a perfect competitive, to a monopolistic, monopoly or oligopolistic market structure. Market concentration is related to industrial concentration, which concerns the distribution of production within an industry, as opposed to a market. In industrial organization, market concentration may be used as a measure of competition, theorized to be positively related to the rate of profit in the industry, for example in the work of Joe S. Bain. An alternative economic interpretation is that market concentration is a criterion that can be used to rank order various distributions of firms' shares of the total production (alternatively, total capacity or total reserves) in a market.

A Simulation-Based Heuristic to Find Approximate Equilibria with Disaggregate Demand Models

Michel Bierlaire, Virginie Janine Camille Lurkin, Stefano Bortolomiol

Oligopolistic competition occurs in various transportation markets. In this paper, we introduce a framework to find approximate equilibrium solutions of oligopolistic markets in which demand is modeled at the disaggregate level using discrete choice models ...

INFORMS2021

Price-based regulation of oligopolistic markets under discrete choice models of demand

Michel Bierlaire, Virginie Janine Camille Lurkin, Stefano Bortolomiol

We propose a framework to find optimal price-based policies to regulate markets characterized by oligopolistic competition and in which consumers make a discrete choice among a finite set of alternatives. With this framework, we can include general discret ...

EPFL2021

Price-based regulation of oligopolistic markets under discrete choice models of demand

Michel Bierlaire, Virginie Janine Camille Lurkin, Stefano Bortolomiol

We propose a framework to find optimal price-based policies to regulate markets characterized by oligopolistic competition and in which consumers make a discrete choice among a finite set of alternatives. The framework accommodates general discrete choice ...

2021